Corporate America had not yet embraced the Green Marketing movement when BP, the world’s third biggest integrated oil group, launched its eco-conscious campaign at the beginning of the decade. At the time it seemed novel for an oil company to join environmentalists in calling for groups to return to the earth that which humans take from it. Ann Hand, SVP of Global Brand Marketing and Innovation for BP, has helped successfully grow the brand’s verdant view over the past seven years. In a recent Brand Fast-Trackers episode, Hand shares Green Marketing secrets with Brand Connections CEO and founder, Brian F Martin.

During the 2000 BP/Amoco merger, Hand says the public firm was fortunate to have a CEO who understood branding in the marketplace and internally. “The choice to move away from the British Petroleum shield, and the word British Petroleum, and to embrace the simple initials BP and our (Helios) logo … was quite a brave move.” It also opened the door for changes that made environmental concerns one of four primary corporate brand values. Hand, who started her professional career as a marketing rep for Mobil, believes BP’s recent track record backs up the promised ideological shift. The AdAge 40-under-40 nominee also stresses that BP has gone green without hindering the profitability.

The British Petroleum name was not well-known stateside at the time of the merger, but the new company opted not to take piggy-back on Amoco brand’s positive equity, favoring a total re-brand instead. Conscious of Amoco’s consistently high fuel-quality ratings, BP still points out that Amoco fuels flow from station pumps but little else remains of the once iconic brand. “The power of a brand is when you scale it up and leverage it. For us to have multiple brands out there competing against each other in the same market place didn’t make sense from an efficiency point of view.” Besides the obvious tie-in with its new corporate culture, using green as BP’s primary color helped distinguish it from the reds, whites, and blues that dominate oil industry competitors.

Going green isn’t simply a matter of color or environmental choices, according to Hand. Successful Green Marketing must pass the red face test in the marketplace. “It’s a bit of a dilemma right now when you do step out and try to do the right things that are green,” she says. That’s because firms also risk being labeled “greenwashers” whenever they take up the environmental banner, even if they’ve demonstrated eco-friendly practices throughout their corporate history. Finally, companies must weave corporate responsibility in with other primary goals and be sure to educate consumers about the good they’re doing. One of the ways BP accomplishes this last imperative is by communicating with consumers when they visit one of the company’s 28,500 petrol stations.

Gassing up your vehicle is never a fun event, Hand acknowledges, but with 13 million customers frequenting BP stations every day, the London-based company has a prime opportunity to earn customer loyalty. “I looked at that and I thought: That’s such a huge untapped asset – all of those impressions, that whole experience that someone goes through. What are the ways that I could show them what my BP brand is about during those three minutes?” Enter the Helios Power program, which aims to bring some of the brand’s core green elements to life for consumers. The SVP has helped install reminders of BP’s green mission at service stations, along with environmental tips for drivers.

The franchise relationship BP has with most station owners and operators further complicates brand management. “About 80% of those (stations) I don’t control directly,” Hand says. “They’re run by our franchisees and partners, and most of them aren’t shiny beautiful big and new with carwashes and convenience stores. They’re everyday gas stations.” But because customer expectations are so low “small steps could mean a lot in this category,” she says. Minor improvements in customer service, bathroom cleanliness, and environmental awareness promised major brand equity. That’s precisely what the “A Little Better” campaign and TV ads sought. BP still needed franchisees to buy in for the program to work. “In a way our fussiest customer group that we had to really ‘wow’ with this work, to create a pull to get them to really execute these promises at every corner, was actually the population of operators who run those sites in the U.S.” At the end of the day “it is smart marketing, plus operational improvement that will drive loyalty,” according to Hand. Part of the successful marketing equation incorporates positive communication with kids (via character trading cards), on-line gamers (with Miniclip’s Gas Mania), and urban targets (at L.A.’s Helios House).

The Indiana native claims to have learned quite a bit from her early days operating eight downtown-Philadelphia stations she now likens to mini 24-hour-a-day soap operas where anything could happen. She thinks such experiences lend credibility to marketers trying to push branding agendas through the system. Hand also strives to identify an “emotional hook” and a higher purpose as motivation for her daily work. Finding that higher calling seems to have worked for the oil-industry lifer – it’s also helped BP pump another kind of green.

Lisa Weinstein became MindShare’s youngest Managing Director earlier this year when she accepted the position at the world’s No. 3 communications planning agency. Named to AdAge’s 40-under-40 list of rising executives, the 33-year-old’s path to the top has already run quite the gamut. She shares observations about client management, emerging media and winning characteristics in a recent Q-and-A session with Brand Connections founder and CEO Brian F Martin.

A journalism major at Indiana University, Leo Burnett’s media department recruited Weinstein out of school to work on the Miller portfolio. She then moved to Ogilvy & Mather as a supervisor on the just-merged Amoco/BP account. After briefly straying into event marketing, she returned to the media world to run the Dow business at OMD. It didn’t take MindShare long to poach Weinstein and install her as BP’s global planning director. The Indiana native took a promotion to manage the Chicago MindShare office in her latest career move. A winding path for sure, but Weinstein says the twists and turns reinforced her affinity for the career. “I have to say I wouldn’t do anything differently because I learned a lot from every move that I made, every new client and piece of business that I worked on – even that short time when I left the direct media and communications and planning and investment business.”

Along the way Weinstein has gleaned some ideas about what clients demand from media advisors. “Clients ultimately want people that are passionate about their business, are dedicated to their business; that they can really trust to steward quite frankly a whole lot of money that we’re investing on their behalf,” she says. In a broader business perspective, Weinstein believes clients are looking for advisors who can navigate them through complex times and simplify the path from A to B. The number of communication pathways swirling around is sometimes scary, she admits, but it’s also incredibly exciting because of these expanding possibilities. “The very cool thing is that clients right now are OK to take a little bit of risk and make mistakes,” notes Weinstein. One of the best ways to get a handle on the complex times and pass the digital IQ test is to jump in feet first.

Whether it’s developing an iGoogle page to streamline client information, downloading Trillian to manage instant message platforms, or joining Facebook, Weinstein believes it’s part of the job to be “personally invested” in the burgeoning technology that baffles so many. Mastering emerging media is a necessity, she says, as more clients clamor for technology-laden communications strategies. “I would say across the board all clients are saying ‘let me be your guinea pig,’ which is different than it was a year ago.” Even as more clients ask her to try something new for them, others remain reticent. The Managing Director, however, sees no reason why swooning sectors, such as casual dining and retail, are slow to embrace new approaches.

Utilizing emerging media seems more critical, she says, when coupled with the ideas espoused by Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. The book asserts that consumer choice proliferation and the technological advances that enabled media fragmentation have combined to splinter the market into smaller segments. Still, it’s quite possible to capture market share that equals or surpasses that of blockbuster items, Anderson argues, if items in lesser demand are properly marketed and distributed. This imperative forces marketers to focus on “all the little opportunities and the niche ways of communicating with people that exist at that tail,” since we’re no longer a hit-driven society, notes Weinstein. Fortunately the same technology that elongated the so-called tail also enabled marketers to communicate via tailored messages that align with specific personal behaviors of individual consumers. “I think even mass media the way we think of it today is going to be addressable media,” she posits. A far cry from the blanket Super Bowl ads of yore.

Technology alone can’t take you to the top. A woman who believes people make their own luck, Weinstein sees passion and dedication as touchstones on the path to one’s absolute potential. “I don’t ever see an obstacle, I always see an opportunity,” she says. “I think that people who are really successful are constantly looking for ways to overcome and don’t see anything as a real roadblock, but rather as a way to find a different solution.” Leaders must also learn to become solution and action oriented, she suggests. “You have to be able to constantly come to the table with an action to move something forward or with a solution. Clients don’t want to hear about problems. They don’t want to hear about what we can’t do, they want to hear about what our solution is – our proposed solution and the action we’re going to take.” Wise words from the mind of a media maven in the making.